


the brick

by bluebeholder



Series: the accidental epic [28]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Domestic Bliss, Les Misérables References, M/M, Mention of Javert's Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-25
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2019-01-05 10:34:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12188313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: Percival has a bone to pick with Victor Hugo, Credence puts dishes away in the wrong place, and dinner is eaten.It's domestic bliss. What else is there to say?





	the brick

**Author's Note:**

> YES, the title is a reference to Les Mis, I feel semi-justified, The Brick clocks in at ~655,000 words and I'm currently at 179,562 words. (Before posting this fic. Tag in another 2,000.) I'll have at least gotten halfway there by the time all's said and done, if not more. 
> 
> I have a problem, y'all.

“Credence! _Credence_!”

Percival is shouting from the kitchen. He sounds like he might actually be irritated. Credence looks up from the paper he’s composing on the abysmal management of invasive magical plant species and their impact on No-Maj environments, a topic Newt set him loose on last time that he and Tina were here on a flying three-day visit on their trip around the Arctic Circle. He sets his pen down and stretches his hands. “Yes?”

“Get in here!”

“Is something wrong?”

“ _Yes_!”

Credence climbs to his feet and cracks his neck. He gives a regretful look at his paper and then walks down the hall to the kitchen. “What?”

Percival, who’s standing in the middle of the kitchen with every cupboard door wide open, glares at him. “Do you see anything wrong with this?”

“…you’ve got all the doors open?”

“No!” Percival spreads his arms wide, encompassing the whole room. “Try again!”

Credence’s plants occupy every available surface, there’s a stack of Percival’s books beside the sink, a jar full of pens resides beside the jars of flour and sugar and coffee beans because Credence doesn’t like searching for them when he wants them, there are three separate coffee cups in the sink because Percival can’t be bothered to clean them up…it’s very usual. There’s nothing out of place. “I don’t see what you’re on about.”

Percival gestures again, a flick of his wand, and every piece of dishware in the kitchen rises into the air, floating pointedly. “Do you remember where all of these started?” he asks.

“They’re in the cupboards, not—”

“They’re in the _wrong_ cupboards!” Percival says. He waves his wand in a complicated pattern, and the dishes zoom through the air, rearranging themselves immediately, spinning and flourishing as they go. “Cups go there, plates go there, bowls—”

“I get it, I get it!” Credence says, laughing. He waits for the dish projectiles to stop moving and settle with irritable clatters on the shelves before sliding into a chair at the kitchen table. “I just can’t remember where they go. It’s so…idiosyncratic!”

Percival sits down in the chair next to Credence, kitty-corner. He’s scowling, but there’s a smile waiting in the wings. “Well, if you paid half as much attention to them as you did to your plants…”

Credence kicks Percival’s leg under the table. “You have an obsession.”

At that, Percival’s scowl breaks down. “Well, yes.” Now he’s positively smirking, and…

“I do _not_ mean with me!” Credence slaps his own forehead. “You—”

Percival leans over and pulls Credence in by the front of his shirt. The kiss cuts Credence off and he doesn’t care a single whit. He plants his hands on Percival’s leg, stopping himself from falling off the chair. They’ve done that before, sent one or both of them crashing to the floor because they chose a poor moment to be affectionate. That one bookshelf will never be the same.

“Who’s making lunch today?” Credence asks after a minute. “I mean. Not to break this up too quickly, but…”

“I believe it’s your turn,” Percival says, extracting himself from Credence’s hold with some difficulty. He stands up and stretches. “I’ve made the last…I don’t even know how many.”

Credence gets up and pushes his chair in. “All right. Go off and read your book. What is it, again?”

“Les Misérables,” Percival says.

“Oh, that brick.”

“It’s good, Credence.”

“You and your romances.”

Percival gives Credence a wry look. “Look in a mirror. I don’t think you have room to talk. Besides, it isn’t a romance.”

“You only ever talk about Marius and Cosette.”

“I think I’ve gone on equally as much about Les Amis.”

Credence rolls his eyes. Fact is, there appear to be enough characters in that book that Percival will never stop talking about any of them. “Go read, Percival.”

With Percival out of the way, Credence gets to work on lunch. He’s not entirely hopeless in the kitchen, but he never really practiced anything but the most basic preparations in the charity kitchen back in New York. When pressed, Credence falls back on easy things like soup.

They have canned tomatoes—which Credence himself grew just a couple of months ago—and between that, baked beans, a few simple spices, and some of Percival’s sinfully good chicken stock he pulls together an acceptable soup and leaves it to boil. He’s done this one more than once before. Luckily, even if it’s ridiculously simple, Percival has yet to complain. Then again, the man is of the firm opinion that the best food is always the stuff that will keep a person on their feet for hours in the most strenuous activity, and by that measure this soup is a paragon.

Of course, as the dishes demonstrate, Percival has started getting house-proud in a way that honestly baffles Credence. He’s never struck Credence as the kind of man to be…well, to be _domestic_ , but here they are anyway. If Credence had to make a guess, it’s that Percival has lots of energy and now he hasn’t got paperwork or dark wizards to direct it at. So he’s making them both suffer through a house.

Actual food done, Credence tackles dessert. While Credence is well aware that Percival couldn’t possibly care any less about dessert, Credence _does_. He spent too many years eating hardly any sweet things, and at this point he’s more than willing to indulge. He’s no baker like Jacob, not even in the same ballpark, but last time Queenie had been here she’d walked Credence through how to make something she called “rummage”.

Credence goes methodically through the pantry, turning up leftover applesauce, stale bread, odds and ends of preserved fruit and jam, the crumbs from a cookie jar, and literally anything else leftover and edible. He only does this every few weeks, when there’s guaranteed to be enough that dumping it all into a serving dish will be impressive instead of pitiful. It’ll end up being mixed with water, molasses, sugar, cream, and possibly fruit juices if he finds any, and then stuck in a low heat in the oven while they eat and probably get distracted by Credence lecturing for an hour on his latest subject.

He's halfway through the pantry (there are somehow the heels of _four_ different loaves of bread on the counter and they really need to have a discussion about the suitability of toast as an entire dinner) when he hears Percival swearing in the library.

He nearly hits his head on a shelf leaping to his feet and practically sprinting into the other room, heart racing, sure that something awful had happened. “What is it?”

Percival holds out the book. “Just read this!”

Credence takes it and scans the opened passage. He knows exactly when he’s hit the relevant bit:

_Javert remained motionless for several minutes, gazing at this opening of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled attention. The water roared. All at once he took off his hat and placed it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall black figure, which a belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom, appeared erect upon the parapet of the quay, bent over towards the Seine, then drew itself up again, and fell straight down into the shadows; a dull splash followed; and the shadow alone was in the secret of the convulsions of that obscure form which had disappeared beneath the water._

“Oh.”

“He _killed himself_ ,” Percival says, taking the book back and glaring at it.

Credence scrambles to remember anything about this ‘Javert’ character—oh, yes, the lawman who pursues the main character because he’s a reformed fugitive of the law. “Why?” He sits down on the floor, cross-legged. They’ll be here a bit, then.

“Moral turmoil because the man he’s been chasing for years spared his life,” Percival says. He flips backwards a few pages and reads: “Infallibility is not infallible, there may exist error in the dogma, all has not been said when a code speaks, society is not perfect, authority is complicated with vacillation, a crack is possible in the immutable, judges are but men, the law may err, tribunals may make a mistake!”

“That sounds like something I’d write,” Credence says.

Percival looks at him with some kind of constrained fury. “It does,” he says. “Javert’s been an irreproachable man his whole life. Upright, lawful, implacable. A model of an enforcer of the law.”

It’s dawning on Credence where this is going. “Go on.”

“And the very moment he gets the chance to understand that the law can be infallible, he throws himself into a river rather than turn and face that ‘unknown moral sun’.”

“…I think I see.”

Tossing aside the book, which lands with a thud on the floor, Percival shakes his head. “Hugo did him a disservice. Javert could have tried to reconcile himself with the reality of the world. That things are complicated. Instead…”

“He jumps.”

“Hugo tears apart his own argument,” Percival says. “Can a man change what he is? Hugo wants to claim it, but Valjean never did. He was good from the first, thrown in prison for stealing a loaf of bread, and his character was only hidden for a while. Javert has always had the character of a lawman, rigid to the point of evil, and even if that character gets obscured he eventually turns to it. There’s no true redemption in this. No hope.”

Credence traces the letters on the spine of the book where it rests by his knee. “Did you like him? Javert, I mean.”

“See for yourself,” Percival says with a small, slightly bitter smile. “If you can find it, ‘Javert Satisfied’ is the chapter.”

It doesn’t take long for Credence to locate the chapter in question. He reads—it’s short, and Percival seems willing to wait. And Credence understands. _…he, Javert, personified justice, light, and truth in their celestial function of crushing out evil. Behind him and around him, at an infinite distance, he had authority, reason, the case judged, the legal conscience, the public prosecution, all the stars; he was protecting order, he was causing the law to yield up its thunders, he was avenging society, he was lending a helping hand to the absolute, he was standing erect in the midst of a glory…_

He looks up at Percival, waiting. “It’s not that I liked him,” Percival says.

“You were him.”

“I was.”

“And you didn’t pitch yourself off a bridge, when the truth faced you,” Credence says. He sets the book aside, aware as always that they’re somehow mimicking that moment on the warehouse floor again, a living parallel to their own history. Percival looking down on Credence, but this time, Credence is the one to stretch out his hand.

Percival takes Credence’s hand. “It’s just…frustrating. To know that people are so dead-set against a future for men like me.”

“They’re against mine, too,” Credence says.

“Does no one see the point of happy endings for stories?” Percival asks, staring at the book.

God help them both. Credence is going to start throwing books out of the house if this happens every time Percival gets near literature. “Come on,” he says, rising to his feet and pulling Percival with him. “The happy ending for tonight is dinner.”

They head back to the kitchen, and Credence finishes the rummage quest while Percival discourses at length about the book. He has a surprising amount to say about Parisian sewer construction. The soup is too hot and Credence burns his tongue, and that makes Percival laugh. By the time they’ve finished eating, the rummage is warm and doesn’t taste anything like a bowl of leftovers. Credence _does_ tell Percival off about eating only toast for dinner, and Percival counters that if he ate other things Credence’s rummage would not be nearly as good.

They do the dishes together; Credence washing by hand and Percival sending them floating by magic to what he considers to be their proper places. Percival makes slightly snide comments the entire time he’s putting the dishes away. Credence retaliates by splashing him with soapy water. It’s ridiculous and domestic.

“You know, I do think there’s an ignored parallel here,” Percival says, as Credence hangs up the dishtowel. “Between you and Enjolras.”

“What, the revolutionary?”

Percival, leaning on the wall, smiles. “Yes. Which would make me Grantaire, but there are far worse things.”

Credence cocks his head. “What are you on about now?”

“I went and became a skeptic, after my look into the moral sun,” Percival says. “But this skeptic has one fanaticism: neither a dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science, but a man.”

“Percival…”

He keeps talking, ignoring the blush that must certainly be all over Credence’s face by now. “Do you know, Hugo wrote out my thoughts before I’d had them. ‘Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm, upright, hard, candid nature charmed him…’”

Credence covers his face with his hands. “Stop it!”

Percival laughs and pulls Credence’s hands away and rises up to kiss him. “I’ll stop,” he says. “I think the reason that Javert didn’t make it…is because he didn’t have anything or anyone he truly lived for, once the law was gone.”

“And you do?” Credence murmurs, splaying his hands on Percival’s chest.

“I’m still here.”

It’s answer enough, and Credence smiles. They are still here, aren’t they? And they will be, for so much more time to come.

**Author's Note:**

> Rummage: cookbook from the 1920s. Honestly, it sounds like the kind of stuff people in dorm rooms come up with in a panic because they forgot to go to the store. Why are you looking at me funny? I’ve never done something like that. XD
> 
> That moment when you fall down the rabbit hole looking for a slang term’s origin. I won’t go into the dirty details of how far I had to go to find that “houseproud” is an old term, but suffice it to say that the term was being used at least as far back as 1890, when it’s to be found in F. Mabel Robinson’s The Plan of Campaign: A Story of the Fortune of War. [You can read that here](https://archive.org/details/plancampaignast00robigoog).
> 
> The translation of Les Misérables used here is Isabel Hapgood’s 1887 translation, available on Project Gutenberg [here](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm).
> 
> Don’t think too hard about that parallel to Enjolras and Grantaire, mmmmmmmmmkay?


End file.
